Telstra's pre-election present to Coonan: 211 more ADSL exchanges

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 10 October 2007 16:22

Opinion and Analysis

Maybe the frosty relations between the Government and Telstra are thawing. With an election announcement expected any day now communications minister Helen Coonan has just announced that Telstra will install ADSL in more than 200 rural exchanges, with funding from the Australian Broadband Guarantee scheme.

And just to make sure all those broadband-connectable rural voters know who they are, the minister's press release has listed every one of those 211 exchanges. That’s' more information than we ever got about Opel!

And talking about Opel, I have to ask how this rollout dovetails/duplicates/disrupts (pick one) with the Opel plan. When she announced the award of the $1 billion handout to Opel in June, the minister said that Opel’s wireless network would cover almost 9.5 million premises across Australia, offering broadband speeds initially up to 6Mbps, increasing to 12Mbps by 30 June, 2009 from a network of 1361 "new state of the art wireless broadband WiMAX sites."

One top of this, she said that Optus would deliver 1.9 million premises in regional areas access to even faster speeds of up to 20Mbps by enabling an additional 312 exchanges with ADSL2+ broadband, funded out of the $1 billion, and that Optus was enabling a further 114 ADSL2+ exchanges on a commercial basis.

That’s 426 new ADSL2+ exchange and somewhere north of 10 million premises to get access to broadband, thanks to Opel and the Government's $1 billion. There are only 21 million people in Australia and most of us live in the big cities. At 30 June 2001 there only about 7.4 million households in Australia. So it looks like the minister thinks every rural chook shed, dog kennel and outside dunny might be a candidate for broadband.

Does this mean that the government is funding two competing broadband infrastructures? If not, how was it decided which exchanges would get government-funded Opel DSL, and which government-funded Telstra ADSL?

All Coonan was saying was that "Access to fast affordable broadband will shortly take another leap forward with the roll-out of the Opel Network...Opel will build a new competitive state-of-the-art broadband network that will extend high speed broadband services out to 99 percent of Australian premises." Competitive eh? Perhaps that does mean that rural Australians will get government-funded duplicated infrastructure.